Matt Singer

We have very sad news to report from The New York Times: Leonard Nimoy, Star Trek’s Mr. Spock for almost 50 years, has died. Nimoy’s wife, Susan Bay Nimoy, told the Times the cause of death was “end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.” The beloved actor and director was 83 years old.

At long last, the Oscars are in the books for another year. As usual, the Academy Awards made for a night full of memorable moments, great speeches, and huge disappointments. (You deserved better, Boyhood.) Here now, the highs and lows of Oscars 2015 — all the things the Oscars got right this year, and all the things they got wrong:

The dust has barely settled from the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, and already we’ve got a look at the lineup for the 2015 South by Southwest Film Festival. After an initial announcement that included opening night film ‘Brand,’ about comedian Russell Brand,’ things have filled out really nicely with a ton of promising-sounding selections.

So Sony and director Paul Feig have found their new Ghostbusters: Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon. This whole idea of an all-female ‘Ghostbusters’ reboot came together after the passing of original series star and co-writer Harold Ramis, when director Ivan Reitman relinquished the franchise’s director’s chair and everyone involved finally gave up on trying to convince stubborn (and probably very wise) Bill Murray to make a second sequel to the original film.

Okay, so there was a fair amount of disappointment around the 2015 Academy Award nominations. Everything was not awesome for ‘The Lego Movie,’ robbed of a Best Animated Movie nod, and David Oyelowo’s dreams of a Best Actor nomination vanished when Steve Carell and Bradley Cooper’s names were mentioned instead. ‘Force Majeure’ got snubbed for a Best Foreign Language Film nomination and ‘Selma’’s Ava Duvernay was robbed in the Best Director Category. I just keep looking at the list of nominations and playing “Sad Trombone” over and over again. It’s basically the official theme song of the 2015 Academy Awards.

Every year, Little White Lies Editor-at-Large David Ehrlich celebrates the best movies with a video countdown supercut. The newly released 2014 edition is typically excellent, and covers Ehrlich’s picks for the top 25 films of the calendar year (even if I might quibble with some of his individual choices coughsomethinginmythroatnotreallyIjustdon’tlike‘Godzilla’cough).

If its portrait of him is accurate, then Abraham Lincoln would have loved Steven Spielberg's 'Lincoln.' The film is exactly like the man at its center: thoughtful and talkative, equally adept at spinning tales and navigating the murky waters of backroom politics. It suggests that well before Ronald Reagan, our 16th President was truly our nation's Great Communicator.

Movies allow us to experience life through another person's eyes. Video games allow us to experience life through another person's eyes -- and to control their decisions. We spend hours upon hours with these video game characters, until we feel like we know them; Mario, Sonic, Pac-Man, their adventures are so memorable, and their personalities so vivid that they almost seem alive. But of course their adventures and their personalities are all predetermined by programming, and they remain forever trapped by their unbreakable directives. If these characters weren't just a series of electronic impulses and computer code, it would be a tragic existence.

That, essentially, is the premise of 'Wreck-It Ralph,' a manic children's film about the souls of video game avatars. Made by Disney, it greatly resembles the premise of Disney's (and Pixar's) modern classic 'Toy Story,' in which toys are revealed to have lives and thoughts of their own when no one's around to play with them. Here we learn that when a suburban arcade shuts down for the night, the characters inside all the games cross over into each other's universes to socialize.

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